Frankly Irritating Git Day

Of course, everyone is aware of how Frankly Irritating Git Day came about. It was originally intended as a single one-off event where smugly oleaginous B and C list celebrities patronised 'ordinary' members of the public in the holy name of 'charity'. Unfortunately, it has since gone on to become a nauseatingly annual endeavour. An event where the almost-forgotten 'entertainer' can boost his, or her, (and, sometimes, its) chances of re-employment on the nation's TV screens through an adept use of some former glory that may reside as a dim memory within the mental canyons of permafrost that are all that remains of the average totally-mashed couch potato's mental faculties.

This pale retread of past glories is in - at least in what passes for - the minds of the TV fraternity changed with dragging these things before the stultified public - is 'temptingly' and 'amusingly' sometimes re-cast as a 'special' performance. Usually it is made more tiresome through the aid of guest performers from some other branch of the media not normally associated in the public mind with the brain-dead prolefeed that used to parade under the sobriquet light entertainment in the days when the world was in black and white. Why such an occurrence should ever have been regarded as in any way humorous is - fortunately - lost in the mists of history.

As all these delights are all instigated in the name of 'charity', they are therefore immediately granted immunity from any questioning and criticism, least one be re-cast as the miserly Scrooge deliberately pissing all over the proceedings that these noble and selfless celebrities - out of the goodness of their hearts - have bestowed upon us - the never-grateful public. Furthermore, we should be grateful they have done it for free, not for the usual sordidly cross-bred and incestuous reasons of ego and mammon that usually motivates them to leave their gated and guarded mansions.

It is - of course - a given that charity is a good, fine and noble thing. To even raise the question of whether ‘events’ such as this are – even slightly – a sort of corruption of that very nobility of charity, which is about the conscience of the individual, into these manifestations of the current Left-wing based conventional wisdom that the proles must be forced, cajoled and ordered into doing the right thing, in case they – Marx forbid – have the audacity to want to think for themselves is to teeter on the verge of being made an unperson for disparaging what is – so obviously - such ‘a good cause’. To ask why such an annual smug-fest should be even necessary at the current level of excess of communication that infests our contemporary civilisation is to diminish - somehow - the greatness of the event where excess and pointlessness is celebrated. Of course the irony of those in want been paraded in front of the couch-struck in order to drag more money out of them in-between the orgies of excess that is the modern media in full-frontal entertain me or die mode does seem to verge on casting a pall over the proceedings. But in a way, the parade of the misfortunate is - in itself - a part of the entertainment. A form of tax on the proles for wanting merely to be entertained, something that troubles the inner puritan of those who believe they know what is best for the rest of us. Not only that there is the contemporary need for more, more of everything, more entertainment, bigger audiences figures, but most importantly as these things are defined failures or success by how much they raise from the public then there is a demand for excess - more, more than last year, more than any previous year is all they cry.

So, in the end it is for you to do your duty and sit there and be entertained and – in the end – make sure you give in to the moral blackmail and pay up. Because – after all – it is for charity, which – when all is said and done - is still a very good cause… and, well, you wouldn’t have spent it on anything near as worthwhile, anyway, would you?